Are you thinking about waging your own social media campaign? I interviewed Scott Monty, social media guru at Ford, to see how others could learn from their popular ‘Fiesta’ experiment, which profiles 100 Ford Fiesta beta testers as they blog, tweet, and youtube their experiences during pre-planned driving adventures.

Social media is rarely the work of only one person, especially when it comes to implementations done by organizations. Today however, I wanted to talk about the difference that one person made in each of three companies - even though they worked in concert with a team that supported them.

On a December Wednesday morning Scott Monty, Ford Motor Company’s social media strategist (aka Global Digital and Multi-Media Communications Manager) woke up to a potential PR nightmare and it had nothing to do with the bailout. Ford was threatening to sue The Ranger Station, a fan website run by Jim Oakes that was selling counterfeit products using Ford’s logo. Ford was demanding that The Ranger Station surrender its website URL and pay Ford $5,000 in damages.